One morning a week or two ago, my "making" most certainly wasn't a material one - and besides, adding water to a bowl and popping it in the microwave isn't really "making" something, in my mind. Although I routinely say "make" instead of "fix". E.g. "Make a bowl of soup." In other words, dump out a can of soup and pop it in the microwave. As opposed to making a pbj, which requires at least three ingredients, a knife, a plate, messy application of sticky stuff to bread, and an often maddening amount of cleanup, because I invariably get both the peanut butter and the jelly or jam on my fingers, on the edge of the plate, on the counter, even on my forearms and the floor. Because every other time I lose my grip on the knife and it hits the floor, providing the barking scavenger at my feet a lick or two of sweetness. Sigh.
Instead, this making was of the soul... making a connection with my younger self and with my long-deceased father. I don't know if he ever ate ramen; he probably did, because he dined in any Japanese restaurant he could. He loved Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Mexican, German, and some New Orleans Creole dishes - any "ethnic" cuisine available to him. Daddy somewhat patiently taught me how to eat with chopsticks. We weren't allowed to eat Chinese or Japanese food with fork and knife - to do so would be disrespectful to their people and their culture. We ate Indian food with the fingers of our right hands, once again, showing respect for the culture whose food we were eating. (And deeply offending my mother's Southern Belle manners.) This was my father's teaching in the 1960s and 1970s. He didn't show the same respect for my mother's family or their "White Trash" (not his words) food, which was virtually identical to Black soul food, and which, other than the weekly "wash day" red beans and rice which he despised, was never served in our home. Luckily Grandma taught me to appreciate it. Well, most of it. No one's succeeded in getting me to eat real hog's head cheese, pickled pigs' feet or trotters prepared any other way, much less brains, tripe, chitlins, ears, or raw oysters. It should be noted that Mama was the only one of us who refused to eat with chopsticks, most likely a tit-for-tat act of defiance toward Daddy.
I hadn't eaten with chopsticks, at home, for decades. To an almost overwhelming extent I'd abandoned my own family's comparatively sophisticated food culture and embraced (mostly) the simple "white-bread" foodways of the family I married into. It's a blessing to be married to a man with simple tastes when it comes to food - he's never demanded the time-consuming, labor-intensive "gourmet" foods that my father preferred. It was just as well, because the sicker I became, the harder it was to make from-scratch food anyway. I basked in my mother-in-law's comfort food and tried to learn how to cook everything she cooked, and yet still craved almost anything that wasn't "Amurican".
But decades later, poverty, pain, illness, and overwhelming fatigue caused this "foody" to resort to eating packaged ramen noodle soup on an icy cold day. I suspect Daddy would've sighed in disgust and added a large quantity of his favorite condiment - the original red Tabasco sauce. To his dismay I did not inherit his cast-iron stomach, nor his taste for vinegary-spicy things, so that particular delight remains on our shelf, unopened, as a sentimental reminder of my favorite gastrosnob.
This morning, though, the frustration of seeing noodles slip off the edge of my spoon and feeling them slap against my chin sent me to the cutlery drawer, not knowing if we still had chopsticks. I remembered watching diners eating ramen on a travel show, using both a spoon and chopsticks to control the noodles. The spoons were identical to the ceramic ones we used growing up. Time to re-learn how to eat properly. Yes! We have a pair of chopsticks! Sure wish I could remember where I got them - probably purchased them at Trey Yuen, or they might have come from my favorite French Quarter gift shop when I was a kid, a small place off the beaten path, owned by an Asian couple.
